CONTEXTUAL TRENDS IN INTELLECTUAL-DEVELOPMENT

I argue that the historical rupture between paradigms and theories rooted in the acontextual processing accounts of classical physics (e.g., Ebbinghaus, 1885/ 1913) and those rooted in contextualist accounts like Bartlett′s (1932) is being bridged by an emerging trend to incorporate elements from both traditions into a unified account of cognitive development. Two such accounts are the Bio-ecological Theory of intellectual development and the Triarchic Theory of intelligence. I draw on these two theories for illustrative examples of what I perceive to be a more general trend among cognitive developmentalists. Both theories are multipronged frameworks for conceptualizing individual differences in intellectual development. In this paper, however, I focus on only one of these prongs, namely, the contextually dependent nature of processing resources. Regardless of the ultimate success of these two theories, I believe that their successors will continue the trend of incorporating context into processing accounts of cognitive growth, thus bridging the paradigms of Ebbinghaus and Bartlett. © 1993 Academic Press. All rights reserved.